Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive, the largest hard drive to date, sets new high-water marks for capacity, price, and performance. Its speed was especially notable on the PC World Test Center's write tests, where it came within a hair's breadth of matching Western Digital's swift 10,000-rpm Raptor X.

The Barracuda 7200.10 drive that our test center evaluated has 16MB of cache and supports SATA-150 by default, out of the box. We tested it using SATA-300, which required a jumper-setting change.

Seagate's fast and vast Barracuda 7200.10 750GB.Seagate's fast and vast Barracuda 7200.10 750GB.In our performance tests, the Barracuda 7200.10 750GB excelled across the spectrum. Among the bevy of 7200-rpm drives we've tested, it ranked first; and overall, it was bested only by the 10,000-rpm Raptor X. On our write tests, the new Seagate drive took just 2 minutes, 16 seconds to write a 3.06GB file of folders (a scant 2 seconds slower than the Raptor X), and 1 minute, 39 seconds to write a 3.06GB .zip file (a mark 3 seconds better than the Raptor X's).

Reasonable Price, High Performance

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, your wallet won't take a huge hit, either: The SATA version of this drive will debut at $590, which works out to $0.79 per gigabyte. That's higher than the $0.62 average cost of 7200-rpm drives, but it's below the usual $1 per gigabyte paradigm we've seen in recent years when a new drive hits the market.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB combines voluminous storage and high-end performance in a single drive. If you want high-capacity storage, this drive is your best bet: I'd rather use one drive--or two drives configured in a RAID array--than rely on a multidrive terabyte RAID array, many of which harness four or five drives together.